ESOMAR Congress 2023 Day Three - Taking Inspiration Home

Our faces hurt from laughing and smiling so much for the last few days. Our feet hurt from, you guessed it, too much dancing. In fact, our “dance theme” carried all the way to the end of the conference when the Greek dance troupe, Acropolis, came on stage to announce our 2024 location: Athens, Greece. (Members! Please check out our super early bird discount for Congress 2024 at 50% off regular registration for a limited time only.)

Now, back to the serious business of the programme. Whilst artificial intelligence was a clear theme throughout nearly all of our presentations, day three of Congress was packed with a number of sessions directly addressing the impact and importance of this technology on the future of research. We learned from Cisco about real-world ways to leverage unstructured data, AI, qualitative synthesis, and CX listening to create and audience models in an agile way, followed later in the morning by one of our most popular, standing-room-only talks about how to identify AI infiltration of surveys, presented by experts from Ipsos. 

The AI theme continued as Ipsos CEO Ben Page gave his keynote address, “Supercharged Research in a Polarised World: Will AI destroy us or free us?” and our closing keynote by Amelia Kallman, futurist and author, touched on several AI-driven, up-and-coming technologies and how people are using them in the business world. She said, “We are at the beginning of a technological renaissance”, and we need to be ready to “supercharge” our careers and businesses for the weeks, months and years to come. 

Several more sessions captured our attention as the day carried on, addressing very interesting behavioural data and how building detailed personas can predict behaviour; a lively client-side panel featuring Microsoft, The Coca-Cola Company, Reckitt and Philips exploring challenges, opportunities and outdated habits in market research; and many more. 

We were also pleased to announce the winners of three more prestigious awards today. The competition for these awards is fierce, so a hearty congratulations to all the winners:

ESOMAR Best Paper of the Year
“Turning TikToks into Business Insight: How Colart learnt to engage new audiences”

• Jatin Kuckreja - Colart 

• Jeremy Hollow - Listen + Learn Research

ESOMAR Best Qualitative Paper - Peter Cooper Award 2023
“Growing Up Together: Redefining motherhood as a transformational journey, not a role”

• Francky David - Nestlé

• Nathalie Coste - Lovebrands

ESOMAR Congress Best Paper Award 2023
“Virtual Frontiers: Assessing the potential of the metaverse for qualitative research

• Rupert Sinclair & Katrin Scheibert - Kadence International

• Faye Soares - Dow Jones

You can check out a press release rounding up all our award winners for 2023 here. 

Thanks to everyone who made this amazing event possible. We can’t wait to see you next year in Greece. Yamas!